I first learned to play mahjong at an entertainment industry mixer. For years, the standard networking game had been poker, and I spent many a night around a velveteen table, losing $20 at a time to fellow WGA screenwriters.

But in 2022, I was invited to a casual meetup that was centered around mahjong. The game, which had always seemed mysteriously complicated, was in fact as easy to pick up as gin rummy. Conversation flowed over the clack of plastic tiles and the grooved edges of Chinese numbers. I found myself transfixed, locked in for hours at the table. In a way, it felt like a homecoming.

Like many first- or second-generation Asian Americans, I did not grow up playing mahjong. My parents didn’t play the game—they labeled it as mei yi si, a purposeless waste of time. For people of my parents’ generation, mahjong carried a stigma associated with degeneracy and gambling. Besides, they were among the so-called lost generation of mahjong players, too busy grinding out an American middle-class living to while away the hours with frivolity.

Soon after the industry mixer, I began to hear whispers of fledgling mahjong clubs in Los Angeles and New York. Private groups had started to sprout up, spurred on by a word-of-mouth network of Asian women. Then the pop-ups began. Celebrities like Ali Wong and David Choe threw mahjong-themed birthday parties. Even Janet Yang, the president of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, ran a mahjong-themed potluck for Asian women in power.

Soon, Mahjong Mistress, a Los Angeles mahjong collective, was throwing blow-out events at the Aster Hotel and Soho Warehouse. Chop Suey Club, an Asian lifestyle and design boutique in New York City, began hosting a monthly mahjong social at the Ace Hotel. Events range from the free to the ticketed, costing anywhere between $0 and 40. The parties were posh and glamorous, with DJs pumping out dance music and bartenders slinging sponsored liquors as young urbanites socialized over four walls of tiles.

These events were spaces to learn mahjong, but they were also places to see and be seen. Young people in their 20s and 30s were leading a growing revival for the centuries-old game, hungry for a piece of heritage that their parents had tucked away on dusty shelves. They were eager to reconnect with their roots in a way that felt fashionable, entrepreneurial, and zeitgeisty.

The Mahjong Renaissance was fully upon us.

Mahjong has been around since the mid-1800s, but the game has no standardized set of rules. There are Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Filipino, and American Jewish styles of the game; there are 13-tile and 16-tile versions; and every household has its own system regarding points and scoring. Currently, there are more than 40 known variations.

The basic goal of the game is to create sets out of suited tiles. In the 13-tile “Hong Kong style,” four sets of three tiles plus a pair wins you the round. Players—who gather in groups of four—take turns drawing, discarding, and poaching tiles to form sets, which are assembled through both chance and skill. The social nature of the game, combined with the auditory-kinetic rhythm of the tiles, has propagated its universal appeal. But while mahjong can be played by anyone, anywhere, its strongest associations are with Chinese culture and the elderly.  Mahjong has appeared prominently in a few movies centered on the Chinese diasporic experience, most notably 1993’s Joy Luck Club and 2018’s Crazy Rich Asians, both of which included pivotal mahjong scenes starring matronly figures.

But it wasn’t Hollywood that would slip the game back into the mainstream. A viral controversy ensued in 2021 when a pair of white women launched the Mahjong Line, a luxury brand whose tile sets retail upwards of $375. The backlash was swift—they were accused of cultural appropriation, and of purportedly offering an “authentic” product despite eliminating Chinese numbers from a few of their sets in favor of cheeky designs. The national dialogue over who mahjong really belonged to inspired Asian Americans to take a good, hard look at the game.

“[The controversy] reignited people’s love for [mahjong] because if we don’t do something about it, this game is going to become someone else’s,” Samuel Wang, a co-founder of L.A. Mahjong League, told me. “People were trying to figure out what this game is and why people are so angry over it. Asians started playing a little more. Non-Asians started to check it out.”

But the Mahjong Renaissance would not be relegated to the senior community center or retirement home. Instead, it’s been spearheaded by young Asian Americans in the diaspora, many of whom were either born in or grew up in the States.

“Mahjong is this pastime that represents play and downtime, and those weren’t privileges that were afforded to our parents and grandparents as they were trying to survive here,” Joanne Xu, a co-founder of Green Tile Social Club, told me. “There was a lost years era where it became a household game and then it disappeared from the public eye.”

After rediscovering a love for mahjong in the post-pandemic era, Xu teamed up with three friends—Ernest Chan, Sarah Teng, and Grace Liu—to begin a monthly public meetup along the East River in New York City. In May 2022, the foursome kicked off the Green Tile Social Club’s first meeting at the Market Line at Essex Market, a free gathering open to those who were both new and experienced with the game.

Word spread, and Green Tile’s following ballooned. The monthly meetups, which began with just a few dozen attendees, soon moved venues. In February, Green Tile’s Lunar New Year party saw a whopping 500 guests.

“It feels like this undercurrent that has been bubbling for a while across the diaspora. … There was this yearning for mahjong and missing seeing it in the public sphere and seeing it in our social lives,” said Xu. Green Tile’s core audience is aimed at young Asian Americans aged 23–35, but regulars will sometimes bring their parents or aunties and uncles to events. “It blows their mind,” she continued. “It takes a second to register that mahjong is back.”

Today, the team puts on three to four events a month, with series ranging from Mahjong Afterhours (weeknight events at Asian businesses involving drinks, music, and mood lighting) to Mahjong Supper Club (limited-seating events at Asian restaurants with family-style dinners). The Monthly Meetup now has a capacity of 225 people. “We didn’t realize we were waking up a beast when we started the club,” said Xu.

As Green Tile Social Club was extending its reach in New York, another foursome was growing the mahjong scene in Los Angeles. Angie Lin picked up mahjong in 2019 during a summer in Taiwan, sometimes playing from 8 p.m. until the early hours of the next morning. When she returned stateside, she began teaching close friends how to play at house parties. Eventually, she and three other friends—Susan Kounlavongsa, Zoé Blue M., and Abby Wu—formed Mahjong Mistress and started throwing socials across L.A.

The mistresses were stunned when 300 people showed up to one of their early events. “It
was a moment where we realized we were onto something really cool,” said Lin. “Everyone
wants to learn, everyone knows the game but doesn’t know how to play the game.” In 2024, Lin quit her job to work on mahjong events full time. Her offshoot solo project, East Never Loses, is focused on digging deeper into educating people on the history of mahjong.

“Mahjong has so many different styles of play—it’s like an oral history that needs to be passed down,” said Lin. “It’s not something that you can just go online and find out how to play. It’s something you need to be told and taught by another human.”

The game holds personal meaning for Lin as well. When it comes to her father, “we don’t have the best relationship. I go home and we don’t really have anything to say to each other.” But after Lin taught her father how to play the game, they now have something to do together. “It’s truly helped our relationship in ways that I don’t think I could even fathom,” she continued.

Earlier this year, I stumbled onto the Mahjong Mistress Lunar New Year party at Soho Warehouse in downtown L.A. Ever since that industry mixer, I had only managed to find small pockets of friends to wash tiles with in our private apartments (aligning four people’s calendars in a major metropolis is its own Gordian knot). Like many of the people Lin and Xu have described, I was yearning for public places to play mahjong.

I assumed the Soho Warehouse party would be a nice little gathering and arrived after work one night in a sweater and jeans. I was shocked to find a line curving out of the building and around the block, with people dressed to the nines in full makeup and hair. Inside, hip-hop beats bumped underneath the glow of red lanterns and Lunar New Year decor.

The first table I managed to jump on was filled with a group of similarly startled Asian women. We ran the table for as long as we could, before making way for droves of newbies hoping to learn. Players of all ethnicities and ages waited in the wings. By the end of the night, I found myself patiently playing a beginners round with a group of visiting Frenchmen.

Not every mahjong event is a blow-out party, though. Today, L.A. is home to several mahjong clubs for young people, from the casual weekly gathering of Mahjong Underground at General Lee’s in Chinatown to the more structured tournaments of L.A. Mahjong League.

Nancy Hsu and Samuel Wang, co-founders of L.A. Mahjong League, have developed a curriculum to teach the proper etiquette of mahjong. Since Hsu has a background in education, she’s created a pipeline for people to learn the ABCs of 16-tile mahjong to eventually graduate into tournament-style play.

“There’s been a renaissance of Asian representation on-screen and Asian culture and interest,” Hsu told me. “Curiosity around that definitely factors in.”

“Mahjong Mistress made it look cool,” said Wang, chiming in. “And our cool is that everybody learns it correctly.”

Every club founder I spoke to, from Finnegan Wong-Smith of Mahjong Underground to Ruoyi Jiang of Chop Suey Club, attributes the Mahjong Renaissance in part to the epidemic of loneliness arising out of the pandemic and the desire for real connection.

“The world has become more A.I.-dominated, and I think people are yearning for real connections in a natural way,” said Jiang. “There’s a little bit of a ritualistic element to [mahjong]. You’re speaking the same language in this actionable, behavioral way. There’s no digital things involved, everything you need for the mechanism to play is in you.”

Board game clubs ranging from chess to Yu-Gi-Oh! cards have managed to garner substantial followings in urban centers, especially as the sober-curious lifestyle picks up traction and Gen Z and Millennials spend less time partying. “Drinking isn’t really in fashion anymore, mahjong and other games provide the perfect way to connect without a drink in your hand,” affirmed Lin. “It’s not about getting drunk, it’s about talking to the other person.”

On a recent Thursday night at General Lee’s, shouts of “peng!” and “chi!” could be heard over a smattering of tables. Some held Tiki drinks in their hand; others played with a focused sobriety; still others watched the scene unfold from the upholstery of couches or bar stools.

I settled into a familiar groove with a newfound set of friends, each of us calling out the names of the tiles in Mandarin. We used our broken Chinese to casually poke fun and shout out at each other, briefly flirting with the mother tongue in a way that was both delightful and comforting.

The reclamation of mahjong by a younger generation of Asian Americans isn’t just limited to Los Angeles and New York. Baba’s House in the Bay Area and the Four Winds Mahjong Club in London are just some of the many spaces that have drawn a diverse, new generation to the game. But for club founders, mahjong is not just a game, or a cash grab.

“For so many of our generation who grew up with super rich and diverse identities, at some point we had to suppress them or make them less than,” said Xu of Green Tile Social Club. “Finding your way back to your own identity is super intimidating and overwhelming, but something about playing a game as a way to do that lowers the stakes a bit. It makes it feel unserious … and that’s what it should be.”